The creativity of magazines - A Passion Ignited

The cover of a 1984 Computer And Video Games magazine from 1984 which includes a cartoon illustration of the athlete Daley Thompson

It started in the 80's

It was around 1984, and I would have been about nine years of age, at that time, my family lived on a council estate in a place called '7 Ways' in Stretford, Manchester.

At the top of our road, we had a row of shops, your typical, a corner shop that sells a bit of everything, a hair-dressers, a chippy, but the stand-out for me was the newsagents.

The magazine rack

A magazine rack in WH Smiths showing a slection of gaming magazines.

Whenever I ventured into the newsagents, I would head straight over to the magazine rack and look for the video game section.

My only experience of playing video games at this point was in arcades on family trips to Blackpool and Cornwall, but now video games are well-established in people's homes.

An open 1984 Computer And Video Games magazine from 1984, on the pages are game reviews and adverts.

Video games in the home

Because of the massive popularity of video games and magazines about them, we're also flying off the shelves, for me as a 9-year-old, the pages ignited my imagination of what the games we're like to play.

More creativity

An open 1984 Computer And Video Games magazine from 1984, one of the pages includes Atati Ads.

I think there has always been something special about the written paper format and the possibilities it brings, too many times in digital, we go for functional, tried and tested, and we see ‘samey’ designs all over the web and less creativity than the in paper format.

Digital is getting better, though and keeps evolving. The new CSS grid is now widely supported by web browsers, and it does open up more possibilities with more advanced designs on websites and more opportunities for creativity.

A passion ignited

An open 1984 Computer And Video Games magazine from 1984 which shoes a top 30 computer cames chart from that time.

Going back to those early years, I did look forward to looking at the magazines to see the latest computer and video games that had come out.

In later life, I ended up choosing design as my career, but from an early age, I had an appreciation of the use of type, colour, illustrations, game screenshots and art-directed stories, which helped bring the games to life for me.